As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, in my primary and elementary school years, I was ridiculously privileged enough to attend Saint David’s, a private boys’ school in the Carnegie Hill section of the Upper East Side. While I was rubbing blazered shoulders with the sons of powerful executives, diplomats and other movers, shakers and captains of industry (various schoolmates, along the way, included the late John F. Kennedy Jr, the late Ali Reza Pahlavi, the youngest son of the exiled Shah of Iran, and … umm ... Robert Chambers), I can’t say the intra-student dynamic was especially different from any other school. Boys will indeed be boys. There were as many cliques and tribes of posh preps, knuckle-dragging bullies, gormless nerds, perpetually sweaty jocks, insouciant class clowns, anti-social weirdos, high-browed brainiacs and unhinged juvenile delinquents as should be expected (I’ll let you guess which group I was a member of). Somehow, though, we all more or less harmoniously coexisted.
In sixth grade, I had a homeroom teacher I’ll refer to here as Mr. Kozlowski, a gentleman who’d accrued a reputation for both his intolerance for shenanigans and his inventive and scrupulously thorough signature punishment, that being the dread “Ten Words.” Basically, were one foolish enough to test the parameters and incur the wrath of Mr. Kozlowski, one would be swiftly admonished with the laborious task of writing out ten different lengthy definitions from a particularly wordy, antiquated dictionary. In retrospect, that’s not really that big a deal, but try telling that to a sixth grader. Mr. Kozlowski was so adept at administering this unsavory sanction that he even devised a system. Every couple of weeks, he would distribute “Ten Word Passes,” which acted as sort of “Get Out of Jail Free” cards. As such, if you were zapped with a “Ten Words” for being late or interrupting a discussion about Homer’s “Iliad,” you could absolve yourself from the sentence by coughing up a Ten Word Pass. I seem to remember chronically naughty classmates furtively bartering with each other, exchanging baseball cards for extra Ten Word Passes. It was deathly serious.
From Monday to Thursday, around 2:30 pm or so, we’d all repair downstairs to the locker rooms and change into our gear to head out to the verdant expanse of Central Park to go play soccer or softball on the Great Lawn, which, at the time, was neither especially great or even really a lawn so much as just a wide, dusty oval with spotty patches of withered grass. We’d all line up, in pairs, in front of St. David’s and then march west towards the park, invariably testing the patience of whatever unfortunate coach was looking after us. As we approached Fifth Avenue, to our left was the boldly innovative architecture of the Guggenheim Museum. On the northeast corner of that museum was a little walled-in garden wherein they’d periodically exhibit sculpture. During my sixth grade, the sculpture in question was this sort of metallic, inverted mobile that featured two oblong, rectangular panels which moved with the wind. As if it were yesterday, I vividly remember my classmate Theo, a preternaturally funny individual, probably still to this day, marching past it and loudly exclaiming “Lookout for Kozlowski’s Radar!” Given that Mr. Kozlowski was indeed always tuned in, and always listening, it made perfect sense that he’d employ such a surveillance device to monitor our idiocy when we weren’t in his classroom. I remember giggling about that all the way to the Great Lawn. From that point forward, that sculpture was known to everyone as Kozlowski's Radar.
I graduated from St. David’s in 1981 and started attending the Loyola School down on East 83rd Street. I graduated from there in 1985 and then flew off to Denison University in Ohio, from which I graduated in 1989. I can’t readily say how many sculptures have graced that garden on the northeast corner of the Guggenheim since I was in sixth grade, or for how long they stay there, but I’m imagining it’s quite a few. I haven’t been up in that neck of the woods in a long, long time, but I’m pretty sure Kozlowski’s Radar is no longer there.
Cut to 2023... My friend Susan is a writer and a photographer who frequently posts pictures on Facebook that she’s taken around New York City from decades past. Today, she put this one up, and it immediately smacked me in the face, almost getting me to scramble dutifully for a dictionary.
This is Kozlowski’s Radar.
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